The Document Foundation has published statistics that illustrate the growth …

The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.

The statistics released today show that the LibreOffice community is healthy and diverse. Red Hat and SUSE each account for a large chunk of development, but the volunteers collectively have a higher volume of commits than any of the corporate contributors. The total number of monthly commits tends to range from 1500-3000.

The statistics also show the extent of the LibreOffice project's bugfixing and code cleanup efforts, which have been extensive.

LibreOffice is gaining lots of momentum among users, too. Last year, TDF estimated that the number of users who have tried the open source office suite is approximately 10 million. LibreOffice 3.5, a major update with lots of improvements, is expected to arrive next week.

I am having a very hard time contextualizing this article in my mind. What is the frame of reference here? Are these numbers "good"? Does this establish anything about the quality and/or credibility of LibreOffice vs. MS Office, the defacto standard? Does it tell us anything about marketshare?

This article has nothing to do with MS Office or marketshare, so nothing to say on those fronts really. It is entirely about the amount of work being done on Libreoffice since it forked from Open Office and out of Oracle control. That is all.

Used OOo for years, then got employed at a college where everything is MS Office. When I built my new computer I needed an office suite so I got LibreOffice, and have been quite please with the current improvements over OOo, and the planned future improvements. Really impressed with all the support it is getting and I hope to see it grow even more. OOo, while quite nice while I used it, really needed some major updates.

This article has nothing to do with MS Office or marketshare, so nothing to say on those fronts really. It is entirely about the amount of work being done on Libreoffice since it forked from Open Office and out of Oracle control. That is all.

1) There are those who claim without some sort of rich benefactor like Oracle/IBM that the whole project would crash and burn as contributors would leave but the article shows that simply isn't the case - in fact it shows once you get rid of the bureaucratic red tape that comes with the likes of Oracle/IBM the rate of improvement grows exponentially.

2) There is a link between development and marketshare - if end users (both new and previous users who left after finding issues weren't begin fixed) are seeing real visible improvements then marketshare will increase. I know many people who left OpenOffice.org simply because bugs from 10+ years ago were being ignored and contributions from outside the project such as Ximian's enhancements were being ignored by the NIH syndrome that infected most of the OpenOffice.org Sun Engineers minds, "since I didn't create the enhancement myself I'm going to fight tooth and nail to ensure it never gets into the main tree".

3) If you're going to reply to ahmerali then use the reply button to quote the person whom you're replying to - I and many here are not mind readers so without quoting the reply you end up just looking like a man mad standing on a street corner screaming about the end of the world whilst selling pencils.

Glad to see the bloat shrinking, and the continual UI enhancements are welcome.

I hope it one day takes off in its own right and leaves behind all the bad decisions originally copied somewhat slavishly from Office 97. It always struck me as a waste to completely reimplement in open source everything that sucks about commercial software. I'd love for something to do to LO what Canonical did to ...well, the entire linux desktop.

I found and submitted a previously undiscovered bug back in November. I was contacted promptly by a developer, corresponded with him and another gentleman, uploaded example files, they were able to reproduce the bug, and a fix was committed for 3.5. It was a very pleasant and efficient process, and I felt oddly proud to have helped out a little bit.

This serves as a great warning sign to the corporate benefactors behind many open source projects, that if you really do piss off the community off enough, a successful fork *can* deal you out of the equation.

This article has nothing to do with MS Office or marketshare, so nothing to say on those fronts really. It is entirely about the amount of work being done on Libreoffice since it forked from Open Office and out of Oracle control. That is all.

1) There are those who claim without some sort of rich benefactor like Oracle/IBM that the whole project would crash and burn as contributors would leave but the article shows that simply isn't the case - in fact it shows once you get rid of the bureaucratic red tape that comes with the likes of Oracle/IBM the rate of improvement grows exponentially.

2) There is a link between development and marketshare - if end users (both new and previous users who left after finding issues weren't begin fixed) are seeing real visible improvements then marketshare will increase. I know many people who left OpenOffice.org simply because bugs from 10+ years ago were being ignored and contributions from outside the project such as Ximian's enhancements were being ignored by the NIH syndrome that infected most of the OpenOffice.org Sun Engineers minds, "since I didn't create the enhancement myself I'm going to fight tooth and nail to ensure it never gets into the main tree".

That actually helps quite tremendously, thank you. Makes much more sense in light of the apparent disinterest by Oracle in the project.

This article has nothing to do with MS Office or marketshare, so nothing to say on those fronts really. It is entirely about the amount of work being done on Libreoffice since it forked from Open Office and out of Oracle control. That is all.

While that's true, some data for the development under the Sun/Oracle years would have been nice as a comparison. It certainly seems that LO is pushing improvements out quicker than OO.o used to, but that's just my subjective impression.

I found and submitted a previously undiscovered bug back in November. I was contacted promptly by a developer, corresponded with him and another gentleman, uploaded example files, they were able to reproduce the bug, and a fix was committed for 3.5. It was a very pleasant and efficient process, and I felt oddly proud to have helped out a little bit.

I'm glad this office suite seems to finally be updating faster. In OpenOffice it seemed to be glacial. The real question though is when will we start seeing unique features that the world has never seen? Features that Microsoft wishes they had invented first to put into their office suite.

I'm glad this office suite seems to finally be updating faster. In OpenOffice it seemed to be glacial. The real question though is when will we start seeing unique features that the world has never seen? Features that Microsoft wishes they had invented first to put into their office suite.

From a "required to work with Office 8 hours a day" perspective, there's some good additions that I want to try out, like the multiline input bar. And I actually like the look of some of it, which is a first for an opensource program for me, like the autofilter popup (the better look helps functionality).

It's little stuff, but it goes a long ways towards actually make me think about switching. The biggest problem with office suites in that MS Office simply isn't expensive enough to trigger an active push (not compared to some software licenses in my office that get used much less).

This article has nothing to do with MS Office or marketshare, so nothing to say on those fronts really. It is entirely about the amount of work being done on Libreoffice since it forked from Open Office and out of Oracle control. That is all.

While that's true, some data for the development under the Sun/Oracle years would have been nice as a comparison. It certainly seems that LO is pushing improvements out quicker than OO.o used to, but that's just my subjective impression.

Have to say, 80% of my client base is on LO, as well as my own company. 0 complaints so far Comparatively, OOo was nothing but headaches, and Office 2007/2010 is a damned support nightmare until you install ubitmenu.

LO works out of the box. It is on Ninite. And my clients adore it. 100% anecdotal, but good enough for me! I'll keep on using it until there's a good reason to switch to something else.

I know Libre Office is getting the press lately but I can't help wondering how much of that is due to the stasis OO.o is in due to the transfer to the Apache Foundation. The project isn't even up and running yet, so of course there's not a lot of work going into improving it right now; what I mainly wondered is how the progress on LO today compared to the progress of OO.o under Sun/Oracle. Faster? About the same? A little less? For the time being it hardly matters since OO.o is frozen in carbonite until they can get the project migrated and the governance sorted out, so between the two of them LO is the only game in town. For now. After that I have to wonder if there's any point to a separate, Apache-licensed OO.o, and I'm thinking that depends on how many people are willing to work on it + how many people want to take the Apache version and spin it off into a salable product. LibreOffice will have a head start, and code contributions between the two will have licensing problems on Apache's end unless the person writing the patch contributes to both projects separately.

He was always a vocal critic of Sun's stewardship of the project and was influential in starting LibreOffice. He's obviously not a neutral observer and there are likely people who would dispute his analysis, but his perspective is representative of the sentiment that led to the fork.

Wrt OOo under Apache, I think it's unlikely that they will get any meaningful community engagement. Considering the licensing and IBM's priorities, I suspect that Apache OOo will eventually give up on making a user-facing product and focus mainly on making OOo an embeddable document editing engine that is friendly for use in commercial applications.

He was always a vocal critic of Sun's stewardship of the project and was influential in starting LibreOffice. He's obviously not a neutral observer and there are likely people who would dispute his analysis, but his perspective is representative of the sentiment that led to the fork.

Yeesh, that's worse than I thought. It looks like they've got 1/5th as many active developers towards the end of that timeline than LO has today. And I see how how his two big suggestions to improve participation are basically what they did in the move to LO.

Quote:

Wrt OOo under Apache, I think it's unlikely that they will get any meaningful community engagement. Considering the licensing and IBM's priorities, I suspect that Apache OOo will eventually give up on making a user-facing product and focus mainly on making OOo an embeddable document editing engine that is friendly for use in commercial applications.

Kinda suspected it would head that way. I knew IBM was pretty much the only 3rd party corporate backer left, and that's probably for the sake of their Lotus Symphony product. I didn't know if there were any differences in direction between the two base projects that would cause them to diverge, just the licensing (since OO.o can't accept LO code anymore, but the opposite isn't true).

Hummm. Hopefully they can do something about OO being a huge, shitty mess? I am continually appalled no one can make an intuitive office suite anymore. MS Office takes months to master, and OO is even worse. They both suck, and even though OO is free, I find the extra time it takes to learn how to do something that should be very basic makes the whole effort worthless.

I'm a great fan of Ubuntu or Mint on all my rehabbed older computersand I dual boot Linux where one must run win only apps like quick books,there both boots get OOo now Lo. For those who think either is hard to learn,try migrating from a seldom used MsO 2003 to 2010

TDF estimated that the number of users who have tried the open source office suite is approximately 10 million

Tried it? That's a meaningless number unless you're just curious about how many people have even heard of it. The number of active users would be a meaningful stat, this is not. For all we know, 9.999 million dropped it, as I did. I put it on several systems recently, both at home and at work. I obviously wanted to like it, or I wouldn't have bothered with it at all. If they aren't working on start-up times and resource footprints, then they are dead to me and, I suspect, to a large number of potential users.

3) If you're going to reply to ahmerali then use the reply button to quote the person whom you're replying to - I and many here are not mind readers so without quoting the reply you end up just looking like a man mad standing on a street corner screaming about the end of the world whilst selling pencils.

I thought this was kind of funny. One certainly doesn't need to be a mind-reader to work out which of the two posts he was replying to...

Using OO-3.2, I have several manuscripts in various stages of rewrite under UBUNTU_10.04 LTS; the program has performed without issue; hundreds of thousands of words. I have **no wish** to change from OO to anything except a 100% compatible new version of OO-3.x ... who owns/controls/disputes this software ... IBM/pigmy cannibal zobez, Mother Teresa or M$ is of less-than-zero concern. Just don't fuck with my completed work!

Let the ego-trolls in Office-Leap-and-pray (Libray ??) re-roll their work back into OO_3.x presenting me with an automagic upgrade path, requiring no change from my current text structure and zero threat or effort. Just hit the feckin-A UPDATE button!

TDF estimated that the number of users who have tried the open source office suite is approximately 10 million

Tried it? That's a meaningless number unless you're just curious about how many people have even heard of it. The number of active users would be a meaningful stat, this is not. For all we know, 9.999 million dropped it, as I did. I put it on several systems recently, both at home and at work. I obviously wanted to like it, or I wouldn't have bothered with it at all. If they aren't working on start-up times and resource footprints, then they are dead to me and, I suspect, to a large number of potential users.

Remember, this article isn't saying that LO has "arrived" (as in feature complete and the new killer app), but that it's moving fast. I don't know what their roadmap is, but it is infinitely more likely that they are looking into whatever you are wishing for than OOo under Sun/Oracle. If they aren't yet, then they will be more responsive when the community asks.

Using OO-3.2, I have several manuscripts in various stages of rewrite under UBUNTU_10.04 LTS; the program has performed without issue; hundreds of thousands of words. I have **no wish** to change from OO to anything except a 100% compatible new version of OO-3.x ... who owns/controls/disputes this software ... IBM/pigmy cannibal zobez, Mother Teresa or M$ is of less-than-zero concern. Just don't fuck with my completed work!

Let the ego-trolls in Office-Leap-and-pray (Libray ??) re-roll their work back into OO_3.x presenting me with an automagic upgrade path, requiring no change from my current text structure and zero threat or effort. Just hit the feckin-A UPDATE button!

Yeah... so the people you should be ranting at are the OOo folks at Oracle (who continued Sun's screwing up of development) and not the developers of LibreOffice. After all, the LibreOffice developers left because they weren't able to roll their work into OOo.

Although to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why either group should really care? You didn't pay them, and you're apparently unwilling to put in any effort to see if LO meets your needs as is.

I assume those charts were made in LibreOffice? That alone is a noticeable improvement over OO from the very recent past. Any regular user of OO/LO knows that it has not been historically as easy to make good looking documents as it is in MS Office.

"The real question though is when will we start seeing unique features that the world has never seen?"

Why on earth do we need these features? LibreOffice is an office suite - all most people will ever use it (or Office) for is typing and making spreadsheets. The rest (especially unique features as yet unknown) is bloat.

It has been good enough for us to use to reduce our large Office purchases-by keeping Office on only the machines that actually need it (and some do for compatibility and reliability) I've managed to reduce our licensing costs for Office by 70%. LibreOffice works just fine for the rest of the office (mostly document viewing, and very little complicated editing when that is required). And I use it myself for about half my stuff just to keep familiar. Once you are in it for a bit the differences between it and MSOffice are apparent, but nothing has been so difficult for me as to make me prefer one over the other.

All in all, it's good progress, and I hope they manage to continue to make more progress. Yes, I'd like to see a resource reduction release (just keep the features as is and optimize the hell out of it for three months) but all in all it's been pretty excellent for us.

"The real question though is when will we start seeing unique features that the world has never seen?"

Why on earth do we need these features? LibreOffice is an office suite - all most people will ever use it (or Office) for is typing and making spreadsheets. The rest (especially unique features as yet unknown) is bloat.

And currently Office does things with the utmost of efficiency and user interface clarity? There is always room for improvement- it may not need to do more, but it can always do what it does already better.

Google Docs has many killer features: 1) Multi-users and real time collaboration on the same documents.2) Ability to "Google Doc" on most Internet capable devices regardless of the operating system.3) With offline Google Doc, good enough to be a poor man's Abiword working on a DropBox'ed document.4) Could import PDF, possibility to do OCR (or just skip OCR-ing and just archive the whole doc).5) Kinda decent integration with Google Search's quickview, could be better though.6) Kinda decent integration with Gmail, could be better though.

Using OO-3.2, I have several manuscripts in various stages of rewrite under UBUNTU_10.04 LTS; the program has performed without issue; hundreds of thousands of words. I have **no wish** to change from OO to anything except a 100% compatible new version of OO-3.x ... who owns/controls/disputes this software ... IBM/pigmy cannibal zobez, Mother Teresa or M$ is of less-than-zero concern. Just don't fuck with my completed work!

Let the ego-trolls in Office-Leap-and-pray (Libray ??) re-roll their work back into OO_3.x presenting me with an automagic upgrade path, requiring no change from my current text structure and zero threat or effort. Just hit the feckin-A UPDATE button!